by Arthur Crabtree » Sun Feb 25, 2018 5:07 pm
It's more difficult to have a sense of how the bowlers now (Wood, Woakes, Willey, Ball, Stokes, Plunkett etc) stand in relation to players from the old days. The batters now have many more new shots, and we get a sense of that through the bigger scores and increased strike rates they have now. But the bowlers, they have many new deliveries and arguable a greater knowledge of the properties of the ball, yet they just go for more and more runs in spite of their development.
Putting the England bowlers in order of their economy, is basically to put them in order of their debut. Yet the opposite is true of SR, which just keeps on getting better. Few players buck these trends. One England bowler who does, though we haven't got to spin yet, is Derek Underwood. He has the econ of a seventies player, but the SR of a 21st century bowler. Freddie was one of the pace bowlers (like Steyn) who for a time held back the explosion in batting SRs as a bowler.
It feels to me the NZ team of McCullum was at the vanguard of sides who almost gave up on improving economy by bowling dots and just started to try and take wickets as a means of keeping the opposition in a permanent state of rebuilding. Hence we can have a bowler now like Rashid, who feels like a key player for England, but has a very high economy against his very good SR. Twenty years ago spin would dry up the middle overs. Now it feels like they hardly try. They just buy wickets.
It's tempting to just read into the stats that the biggest factor in the pattern of the stats are things extraneous to the quality of the cricketers. Changes in equipment and environment and rules.
I always say that everybody's right.